If we came across very mentally disabled people or extremely early babies (perhaps in a world where we could extract fetuses from the womb after just a few weeks) that could feel pain but only had cognition as complex as shrimp, it would be bad if they were burned with a hot iron, so that they cried out. It’s not just because they’d be smart later, as their hurting would still be bad if the babies were terminally ill so that they wouldn’t be smart later, or, in the case of the cognitively enfeebled who’d be permanently mentally stunted.
wat
This almost reads like an attempt at a reductio ad absurdum of worrying about animal welfare, like you are supposed to be a ridiculous hypocrite if you think factory farming is fucked yet are indifferent to the cumulative suffering caused to termites every time an exterminator sprays your house so it doesn't crumble.
Relying on the mean estimate, giving a dollar to the shrimp welfare project prevents, on average, as much pain as preventing 285 humans from painfully dying by freezing to death and suffocating. This would make three human deaths painless per penny, when otherwise the people would have slowly frozen and suffocated to death.
Dog, you've lost the plot.
FWIW a charity providing the means to stun shrimp before death by freezing as is the case here isn't indefensible, but the way it's framed as some sort of an ethical slam dunk even compared to say donating to refugee care just makes it too obvious you'd be giving money to people who are weird in a bad way.
No shot is over two seconds, because AI video can’t keep it together longer than that. Animals and snowmen visibly warp their proportions even over that short time. The trucks’ wheels don’t actually move. You’ll see more wrong with the ad the more you look.
Not to mention the weird AI lighting that makes everything look fake and unnatural even in the ad's dreamlike context, and also that it's the most generic and uninspired shit imaginable.
His overall point appears to be that a city fully optimized for self-driving cars would be a hellscape at ground level, even allowing for fewer accidents, so no real reason to belabor that point, which is mostly made in service to pointing out how dumb it is when your solution to reducing accident rates is "buy a new car" instead of anything systemic. like improving mass transit.
If you've convinced yourself that you'll mostly be fighting the AIs of a rival always-chaotic-evil alien species or their outgroup equivalent, you probably think they are.
Otherwise shooting first and asking questions later will probably continue to be frowned upon in polite society even if it's automated agents doing the shooting.
The job site decided to recommend me an article calling for the removal of most human oversight from military AI on grounds of inefficiency, which is a pressing issue since apparently we're already living in the Culture.
The Strategic Liability of Human Oversight in AI-Driven Military Operations
Conclusion
As AI technology advances, human oversight in military operations, though rooted in ethics and legality, may emerge as a strategic liability in future AI-dominated warfare.
Oh unknowable genie of the sketchily curated datasets Claude, come up with an optimal ratio of civilian to enemy combatant deaths that will allow us to bomb that building with the giant red cross that you labeled an enemy stronghold.
Maybe Momoa's PR agency forgot to send an appropriate tribute to Alphabet this month.
This post discusses the influence of human biodiversity theory on Astral Codex Ten and other work by Scott Alexander.
Would've been way better if the author didn't feel the need to occasionally hand it to siskind for what amounts to keeping the mask on, even while he notes several instances where scotty openly discusses how maintaining a respectable facade is integral to his agenda of infecting polite society with neoreactionary fuckery.
I could go over Wolfram's discussion of biological pattern formation, gravity, etc., etc., and give plenty of references to people who've had these ideas earlier. They have also had them better, in that they have been serious enough to work out their consequences, grasp their strengths and weaknesses, and refine or in some cases abandon them. That is, they have done science, where Wolfram has merely thought.
Huh, it looks like Wolfram also pioneered rationalism.
Scott Aaronson also turns up later for having written a paper that refutes a specific Wolfram claim on quantum mechanics, reminding us once again that very smart dumb people are actually a thing.
As a sidenote, if anyone else is finding the plain-text-disguised-as-an-html-document format of this article a tad grating, your browser probably has a reader mode that will make it way more presentable, it's F9 on firefox.
This was exactly what I had in mind but for the life of me I can't remember the title.
why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest
I'm thinking combination of you probably having set all your privacy settings to non serviam and most of their sponsors having opted out of serving their ads to non US listeners.
I did once get some random scandinavian sounding ads, but for the most part it's the same for me, all iheart podcast trailers.
It had dumb scientists, a weird love conquers all theme, a bathetic climax that was also on the wrong side of believable and an extremely tacked on epilogue.
Wouldn't say that I hated it, but it was pretty flawed for what it was. magnificent black hole cgi notwithstanding.
Summizing Emails is a valid purpose.
Or it would have been if LLMs were sufficiently dependable anyway.
But “It’s Greek to me” goes right back to the Romans.
The wiki seems to say the aphorism originates with medieval scribes and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
The actual ancient Romans are unlikely to have had such qualms, since at the time Greek was much more widely understood than Latin, so much so that many important roman works like Caesar's Memoirs and Marcus Aurelius' Meditations were originally written in Greek, with the Latin versions being translations.
You’d think AI companies would have wised up by this point and gone through all their pre-recorded demos with a fine comb so that
marksusers at least make it past the homepage, but I guess not.
The target group for their pitch probably isn't people who have a solid grasp of coding, I'd bet quite the opposite.
On each step, one part of the model applies reinforcement learning, with the other one (the model outputting stuff) “rewarded” or “punished” based on the perceived correctness of their progress (the steps in its “reasoning”), and altering its strategies when punished. This is different to how other Large Language Models work in the sense that the model is generating outputs then looking back at them, then ignoring or approving “good” steps to get to an answer, rather than just generating one and saying “here ya go.”
Every time I've read how chain-of-thought works in o1 it's been completely different, and I'm still not sure I understand what's supposed to be going on. Apparently you get a strike notice if you try too hard to find out how the chain-of-thinking process goes, so one might be tempted to assume it's something that's readily replicable by the competition (and they need to prevent that as long as they can) instead of any sort of notably important breakthrough.
From the detailed o1 system card pdf linked in the article:
According to these evaluations, o1-preview hallucinates less frequently than GPT-4o, and o1-mini hallucinates less frequently than GPT-4o-mini. However, we have received anecdotal feedback that o1-preview and o1-mini tend to hallucinate more than GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. More work is needed to understand hallucinations holistically, particularly in domains not covered by our evaluations (e.g., chemistry). Additionally, red teamers have noted that o1-preview is more convincing in certain domains than GPT-4o given that it generates more detailed answers. This potentially increases the risk of people trusting and relying more on hallucinated generation.
Ballsy to just admit your hallucination benchmarks might be worthless.
The newsletter also mentions that the price for output tokens has quadrupled compared to the previous newest model, but the awesome part is, remember all that behind-the-scenes self-prompting that's going on while it arrives to an answer? Even though you're not allowed to see them, according to Ed Zitron you sure as hell are paying for them (i.e. they spend output tokens) which is hilarious if true.
"When asked about buggy AI [code], a common refrain is ‘it is not my code,’ meaning they feel less accountable because they didn’t write it.”
Strong they cut all my deadlines in half and gave me an OpenAI API key, so fuck it energy.
He stressed that this is not from want of care on the developer’s part but rather a lack of interest in “copy-editing code” on top of quality control processes being unprepared for the speed of AI adoption.
You don't say.
Apparently it implements chain-of-thought, which either means they changed the RHFL dataset to force it to explain its 'reasoning' when answering or to do self questioning loops, or that it reprompts itsefl multiple times behind the scenes according to some heuristic until it synthesize a best result, it's not really clear.
Can't wait to waste five pools of drinkable water to be told to use C# features that don't exist, but at least it got like 25.2452323760909304593095% better at solving math olympiads as long as you allow it a few tens of tries for each question.
This is conceptually different, it just generates a few seconds of doomlike video that you can slightly influence by sending inputs, and pretends that In The Future™ entire games could be generated from scratch and playable on Sufficiently Advanced™ autocomplete machines.
Stephanie Sterling of the Jimquisition outlines the thinking involved here. Well, she swears at everyone involved for twenty minutes. So, Steph.
She seems to think the AI generates .WAD files.
I guess they fell victim to one of the classic blunders: never assume that it can't be that stupid, and someone must be explaining it wrong.
Did LLama3.1 solve the hallucination problem?
I bet we would have heard if it had, since It's the albatross hanging on the neck of this entire technology.
>AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding
> Getting full value out of AI workplace assistants is turning out to require a heavy lift from enterprises. ‘It has been more work than anticipated,’ says one CIO.
aka we are currently in the process of realizing we are paying for the privilege of being the first to test an incomplete product.
>Mandell said if she asks a question related to 2024 data, the AI tool might deliver an answer based on 2023 data. At Cargill, an AI tool failed to correctly answer a straightforward question about who is on the company’s executive team, the agricultural giant said. At Eli Lilly, a tool gave incorrect answers to questions about expense policies, said Diogo Rau, the pharmaceutical firm’s chief information and digital officer.
I mean, imagine all the non-obvious stuff it must be getting wrong at the same time.
> He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record,” with no contradictory or duplicate information.
Please stop feeding the thing too much information, you're making it confused.
> Some of the challenges with Copilot are related to the complicated art of prompting, Spataro said. Users might not understand how much context they actually need to give Copilot to get the right answer, he said, but he added that Copilot itself could also get better at asking for more context when it needs it.
Yeah, exactly like all the tech demos showed -- wait a minute!
> [Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said] “If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was,” he said. “You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.”
Nevermind that that's exactly how we've been marketing it.
Oh well, I guess you'll just have to wait for chatgpt-6.66 that will surely fix everything, while voiced by charlize theron's non-union equivalent.
And now I feel like I need to take a shower. Ugh.
An AI company has been generating porn with gamers' idle GPU time in exchange for Fortnite skins and Roblox gift cards
> "some workloads may generate images, text or video of a mature nature", and that any adult content generated is wiped from a users system as soon as the workload is completed.
> However, one of Salad's clients is CivitAi, a platform for sharing AI generated images which has previously been investigated by 404 media. It found that the service hosts image generating AI models of specific people, whose image can then be combined with pornographic AI models to generate non-consensual sexual images.
Investigation link: https://www.404media.co/inside-the-ai-porn-marketplace-where-everything-and-everyone-is-for-sale/
Sam Bankman-Fried maintains that his crimes were victimless and resulted in zero losses, and therefore warrant only six years of imprisonment. Prosecutors argue that 40–50 years are justified.
For thursday's sentencing the us government indicated they would be happy with a 40-50 prison sentence, and in the list of reasons they cite there's this gem:
> 4. Bankman-Fried's effective altruism and own statements about risk suggest he would be likely to commit another fraud if he determined it had high enough "expected value". They point to Caroline Ellison's testimony in which she said that Bankman-Fried had expressed to her that he would "be happy to flip a coin, if it came up tails and the world was destroyed, as long as if it came up heads the world would be like more than twice as good". They also point to Bankman-Fried's "own 'calculations'" described in his sentencing memo, in which he says his life now has negative expected value. "Such a calculus will inevitably lead him to trying again," they write.
Turns out making it a point of pride that you have the morality of an anime villain does not endear you to prosecutors, who knew.
Bonus: SBF's lawyers' list of assertions for asking for a shorter sentence includes this hilarious bit reasoning:
> They argue that Bankman-Fried would not reoffend, for reasons including that "he would sooner suffer than bring disrepute to any philanthropic movement."
rootclaim appears to be yet another group of people who, having stumbled upon the idea of the Bayes rule as a good enough alternative to critical thinking, decided to try their luck in becoming a Serious and Important Arbiter of Truth in a Post-Mainstream-Journalism World.
This includes a randiesque challenge that they'll take a $100K bet that you can't prove them wrong on a select group of topics they've done deep dives on, like if the 2020 election was stolen (91% nay) or if covid was man-made and leaked from a lab (89% yay).
Also their methodology yields results like 95% certainty on Usain Bolt never having used PEDs, so it's not entirely surprising that the first person to take their challenge appears to have wiped the floor with them.
Don't worry though, they have taken the results of the debate to heart and according to their postmortem blogpost they learned many important lessons, like how they need to (checks notes) gameplan against the rules of the debate better? What a way to spend 100K... Maybe once you've reached a conclusion using the Sacred Method changing your mind becomes difficult.
I've included the novel-length judges opinions in the links below, where a cursory look indicates they are notably less charitable towards rootclaim's views than their postmortem indicates, pointing at stuff like logical inconsistencies and the inclusion of data that on closer look appear basically irrelevant to the thing they are trying to model probabilities for.
There's also like 18 hours of video of the debate if anyone wants to really get into it, but I'll tap out here.
quantian's short writeup on the birdsite, will post screens in comments
pdf of judge's opinion that isn't quite book length, 27 pages, judge is a microbiologist and immunologist PhD
pdf of other judge's opinion that's 87 pages, judge is an applied mathematician PhD with a background in mathematical virology -- despite the length this is better organized and generally way more readable, if you can spare the time.
rootclaim's post mortem blogpost, includes more links to debate material and judge's opinions.
edit: added additional details to the pdf descriptions.
Architeuthis @awful.systems It's not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.